Barbara Bush blames Trump for heart issues, new biography reveals

Johanna Gretschel, Austin American-Statesman

Wednesday

Mar 27, 2019 at 2:59 PM

A new biography of Barbara Bush reveals that the former first lady blamed her 2016 “heart attack” on Donald Trump.

The book, “The Matriarch: Barbara Bush and the Making of an American Dynasty,” by USA Today Washington Bureau chief Susan Page, includes interviews with Bush during the final six months of her life and excerpts from her personal diaries.

What Bush describes as a heart attack was not technically a heart attack, but a severe moment in her battle with congestive heart failure and chronic pulmonary disease requiring hospitalization, USA Today reports. The incident occurred in June 2016, four months after her son, Jeb, dropped out of the presidential election. The failed campaign and Trump’s relentless ridicule of Jeb reportedly pushed her over the edge.

By February of 2018, Bush told her biographer that she no longer considered herself a Republican thanks to Trump’s efforts to fracture America.

Bush’s opinion of Trump wasn’t soured by the 2016 presidential election, however. According to the book, she was never a fan of the businessman. In a diary entry dating back to January 1990, she called him “the real symbol of greed in the 80s.”

When his divorce from first wife Ivana dominated the news, she wrote of the messy $25 million settlement: “The Trumps are a new word, both of them... Trump now means Greed, selfishness and ugly. So sad.”

Although she described her “horror” upon receiving the news that Trump won the presidency, Bush actually did not cast a vote for Hilary Clinton, either. Instead, she chose to write in her son Jeb’s name on the last day of early voting.